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Tag Archives: Beatnik

I had an interesting conversation
with my daughter the other day,
explaining the difference between the counter cultures of the mid 1950’s and that of the hippies of the mid 1960’s.

Yes, there certainly was a
counter culture predating
the unfortunate American
involvement in the Vietnam War.

Actually, several….

….including a very interesting
movement during the roaring 20’s.

But, the one we’re gonna talk
about today were the “Beats”
— or the ‘Beat Generation’.

You know, as in BEATNIK.

Of course,
a member of the Beat
generation wouldn’t have
appreciated ya calling
him a Beatnik….

Even though Jack Kerouac
was one of the people who
first wrote about the
“Beat Generation”,

…. he vehemently rejected the
whole ‘beatnik’ stereotype,
and with good reason.

It was originally a
mean-spirited term coined
by San Francisco columnist
Herb Caen as a derogatory
way of inferring the
“Un-American” nature of
beat culture…..

—- the “NIK” being an allusion
to the Russian satellite “Sputnik”.

But, being interested in
free expression is about
as ‘American’ as burned
crust on an apple pie,
as far as I’m concerned,

…… and the Beats were
all about that.

A lot of folks think the term
“Beat Generation” came from their love of bongos or
downbeat, discordant jazz–

…… but it actually meant something entirely different.

The term ” BEAT ” was shorthand
for “Beaten Down”….

… and as a movement was always
about the struggle between the
establishment and nonconformity.

You don’t hear much
about the Beats nowadays…..

….. maybe cause most people
can’t see what anybody had to
be counter-culture about during
the Eisenhower years.

But you had a lot going on…..

Many of the Beats were veterans
of the World War who came home
and suddenly realized they just
didn’t fit in anymore.

The Eisenhower years was the
height of the post-war economic
boom, but also a period of strict
socially enforced conformity.

The Beats were those who
fought against that
rigid imposed uniformity,
and thus, were mainly
comprised
of social outsiders, disenfranchised
artists, poets, writers
and other
creative people.

They dressed agreeable
to their outsider status—

— no poodle skirts and slicked
back hair among the beats —

They were fond of wearing pork pie hats, beards, sunglasses, and sandals…

…. and shaggy haircuts.

But beat culture wasn’t
just about how you looked.

Kerouac’s own writings might give
you some idea of what the movement really represented…..

from the “Philosophy of the Beat Generation” :

“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking
everywhere, ragged, beatific,
beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America——beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.

We’d even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization… ”

Kerouac mentions that the phrase never meant “juvenile delinquents”

— which is indeed what it came to mean in the popular jargon after the media co-opted the movement …..

Ann Charters, Kerouac biographer,
explained what happened next:

“The term caught on because it could mean anything. It could even be exploited in the affluent wake of the decade’s extraordinary technological inventions. Almost immediately, for example, advertisements by “hip” record companies in New York used the idea of the Beat Generation to sell their new long playing vinyl records.”

To really know Jack Kerouac and the “Beat Generation” instead of looking into the conservative 50’s and 60’s social conformity that actually got a firm hold of “beat” and bastardized it into Beatnik so “the man” would “own the issue” and define it to suit the “Establishment” . Beatnik or Hippie was very little “Beat” and perhaps never was. Jack lived to despise being at all associated with either. Hippies and beatniks unfortunately excepted not “beat” of J.K. but the stereotype created by their social conformist parents, specifically, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
To know Kerouac’s “Beat down” generation influences look back to Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman and the many service men and civilians that came back out of WWII and the Cold War fucked up and displaced trying to fit back into the artificial Conservative social straight jacket of the 40’s and 50’s grey suited “American dream”. There, in those misfits, you will find J. Kerouac and the beat generation.
Beatnik and hippie were a creation of American commercial and political capitalism, believe it or not. And the “Baby Boomers” fell for it.